Oxfam's Dame cover-up: How Barbara Stocking buried sickening reports of sexual ...

A rule of modern life is that when some leading quangocrat becomes mired in a gruesome scandal, it’s never their head that actually rolls.

Certainly that’s what happened at Oxfam, the £400 million-a-year aid charity found to have covered up appalling allegations of sexual harassment, prostitution, bullying and even possible paedophilia by its staff.

The ugly affair, which this week resulted in it being handed an official warning by regulator the Charity Commission, claimed the scalp of Mark Goldring, its boss from 2013 onwards, and Penny Lawrence, his deputy. 

This is despite the fact that the despicable allegations largely dated to 2010 and 2011, some two years before Goldring took charge of the now all-but-disgraced charity.

The chief executive who presided over the mess was Dame Barbara Stocking, whose gilded career glides serenely on. 

Currently President of Cambridge’s all-female Murray Edwards College, where she earns £70,000-£80,000 and resides in a £2 million grace-and-favour home with all bills paid, the Left-leaning 67-year-old has spent the past week ducking invitations to defend herself.

She has given no personal explanation, still less any proper apology, for the myriad shortcomings at Oxfam that were identified by the Charity Commission.

Neither has she felt the need to offer any mea culpa for the appalling events that unfolded on her watch. 

After an earthquake ravaged Haiti in 2010, senior Oxfam staff used official charity residences to stage what whistleblowers described as ‘Caligula-style’ orgies with mostly very young — and even allegedly underage — prostitutes.

Dame Barbara has not faced the cameras to express even a hint of regret for the abuse that went on.

There was, for example, no personal admission of wrongdoing over the fact that she allowed her charity’s top official in the country to have a ‘phased and dignified’ exit from his job, after he’d admitted paying for exploitative sex with disaster victims at his Oxfam-funded villa.

She even agreed to pay the sexual predator, 68-year-old Roland van Hauwermeiren, an extra month’s salary, saying he could resign before he was fired. This allowed him to waltz into jobs at rival aid agencies.

Meanwhile, Dame Barbara has still to apologise fully for failing to inform police after a whistleblower emailed her with allegations that Oxfam staff were guilty of child rape. That matter is only now in the hands of the National Crime Agency.

In fact, the closest that this pillar of the liberal establishment came to facing her critics this week was when she joined half a dozen former Oxfam colleagues in hiring a smart London law firm to represent them.

Through their lawyers, they issued a media statement saying ‘we apologise to all those affected’ by the Oxfam sex scandal. (The Mail approached Dame Barbara via these lawyers for comment, but we did not receive a reply.)

Perhaps understandably, many of the people ‘affected’ by the bullying and sexual misconduct that were seemingly endemic in the charity — in Haiti and elsewhere — don’t think this mealy-mouthed legalese is remotely good enough. Take, for example, Lesley Agams, Oxfam’s former director in Nigeria.

In 2012, she emailed Dame Barbara to claim that she had been sexually assaulted by a male colleague in a Premier Inn hotel. The email included a detailed account of the incident, which took place in 2010.

Dame Barbara responded that, regrettably, ‘there was insufficient evidence to corroborate your allegation’ and insisted the charity had ‘acted fairly in fully investigating your complaints’.

Agams, a lawyer who now runs a women’s crisis centre, tells me: ‘It’s absolutely disgraceful that she presided over both the Haiti debacle and my case, and still gets to head what is a women’s college, no less.’

Take also Shaista Aziz, who worked at Oxfam under Dame Barbara and went on to co-found NGO Safe Space, a lobby group that campaigns against sexual harassment at aid agencies. 

She is outraged by the ‘deafening silence’ of Dame Barbara ‘who to this day has refused to properly apologise for the grotesque abuses that took place while she was at the helm of Oxfam GB’.

At Cambridge, many agree. Students have previously accused Dame Barbara of having ‘a complete lack of regard for the victims of sexual exploitation’, and of handling the issue in a ‘colonial way’.

Somewhat amazingly, they were this week sent an email by Dame Barbara’s college seeking to dissuade them from discussing the Oxfam scandal with journalists.

This email, seen by the Mail, claims that while the college ‘is strongly committed to the principle of freedom of speech’, it also believes that ‘the media can be intrusive and manipulative’.

Students were therefore advised to contact a college PR adviser before speaking to the press. Some, perhaps understandably, see this as a crude effort to muzzle them.

Meanwhile, Murray Edwards’s financial donors have been sent an email saying the college is looking into the scandal. Several have withdrawn funding in a bid to force Dame Barbara to resign.

Many MPs take a similar view. Bill Cash, a Tory who drafted the Protection of Children Bill in the 1970s, which sought to prevent sexual abuse by aid agencies, says Stocking’s silence is irresponsible. 

He adds: ‘When it comes to something as devastating as this, the buck stops at the top.’

To understand how things have come to this, one must first wind the clock back almost 20 years, to Dame Barbara’s 2001 appointment to run the charity.

Then plain Barbara Stocking, she was a highly ambitious NHS director who had narrowly failed to be appointed chief executive of the health service by the New Labour government. 

She learned about the vacancy at Oxfam after chancing upon a job advertisement in the Economist magazine, perhaps realising that her liberal credentials made her a perfect fit.

In interviews, Stocking describes herself as a working-class postman’s daughter from Rugby, Warwickshire. ‘The difference in resources between my state school and the (local) public school made me think about inequality,’ she once said.

That

read more from dailymail.....